November 17, 2001 - According to Variety, Jim Carrey will produce and star in Miramax's period pic The Children of the Dust Bowl. The Depression-era drama is an adaptation of social historian Jerry Stanley's prize-winning non-fiction book, which the author describes as a "quintessentially American story, if just a little slice of it." No director or screenwriter have been announced yet.

The trade paper says Children "is set at the Arvin Federal Camp, the emergency farm-labor tent city depicted in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. (The story) follows the plight of migrant laborers and their children who fled Oklahoma for California in 1939 to escape the dust storms of the Midwest. As refugees, the homeless kids went without schooling until a caring high school superintendent named Leo Hart undertook the daunting venture of building them a schoolhouse in a field known as Weedpatch Camp." Carrey will play Leo Hart. Author Stanley, once a professor of history at California State Bakersfield, advised Variety that he met Hart back in 1975 "after his dean ordered him to interview Hart for the library's oral history archives. ... The interview led to a 1986 article for American West magazine, which would become the basis for Children of the Dust Bowl – a book Hart wouldn't live to see published; he died in 1989."

Variety didn't mention when The Children of the Dust Bowl would start filming.

But there haven't been recent newsstories the last years that they are working on it. I doubt this will happen next year.